It’s tricky to cover home price trends in Savannah because of the lack of clear data.

Average sale prices are clearly down from the boom years, but those numbers are really noisy from month to month.

The most widely watched home price indices, like Case-Shiller and CoreLogic, give overviews of national trends and of trends in major metro areas, but midsized cities like Savannah get no mention.

In general, it seems fair to say the arc of prices in Savannah reflected national home price indices, although our local trends lagged nationwide ones.

That’s certainly the evidence in the Zillow Home Value Index, which does chart data for Savannah and other smaller metropolitan statistical areas.

According to Zillow, prices here peaked in January 2008 even though national prices had been falling since mid-2007.

Zillow’s index shows home prices nationwide bottomed last October, but our local prices bottomed in February.

According to Zillow, the Savannah metro area’s index value peaked at about $170,000 in January 2008, tumbled all the way to $126,000 in February 2012 and has now rebounded to $133,000.

That’s a peak to trough decline of about 26 percent, close to the nationwide decline of 23 percent.

Our inventory levels are too high right now, but conditions are far better than in recent years. A steady stream of distressed properties coming onto the market and lighter sales activity will put downward pressure on prices in the coming months.

But other factors — including a slowly healing economy, pent-up demand and a slow pace of new construction — should put upward pressure on prices, especially at the low end.

We might see some further local declines in the Zillow Home Value Index, and it’s always worth adding that the situation can vary dramatically among neighborhoods and price points.

But there’s mounting evidence that Savannah metro area home prices have hit bottom.

Good press reflects some upbeat realities

Savannah is in the midst of some political turmoil, and we’ve hit another of those stretches with a string of serious crimes.

But the good news keeps mounting in spite of the bad.

On Sunday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution featured a lengthy piece about the vibrancy of Savannah’s downtown, and famed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote glowingly of “Little Black Dress,” a new exhibit curated by Andre Leon Talley at the beautiful SCAD Museum of Art.

More importantly, last weekend featured a series of gatherings — like the Savannah Jazz Festival and the opening of Indigo Sky Community Gallery’s “Eye to Eye: The Making of We” — that brought together broad cross-sections of our community.

We are no doubt going to see some additional tension down at City Hall, but that’s likely to have only minimal impact on some of the positive energy brewing this fall.